Mobile digital terminals, such as mobile telephones and the like, are becoming increasingly commonplace throughout the world. Recent technological advances in processing and storage capacity have made it possible for such terminals to become multi-functional. For example, no longer is the mobile telephone limited to telephonic voice communication but may also provide other means of digital communication, such as digital networking (e.g., Internet communication, text messaging, and the like), image or video capture means, digital video broadcast reception, and the like.
As the communication means and the functionality of such terminals expand, such terminals will readily come in contact with an increasingly voluminous amount of media items, such as email, voicemail, digital image files, digital video files, and the like. As the memory capacity of these terminals increases, either via internal memory capacity or the ability to readily access external memory storage elements, the user of the device will have the capability to store and/or access all of these media items.
The increasing amount of media items stored or available to the digital device has been the impetus behind implementation of file storage and organization applications, such as calendar-type or contact/address book-type applications, that allow the user to categorize media items according to the date and/or time associated with the media item. For example, the Microsoft Outlook application, available from the Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., provides for storage and categorization of email, voicemail and the like according to the date of receipt or the date of transmission of such data. Other applications have been developed that are more suitable to mobile terminals and enable the user to efficiently locate a media item according to the time associated with that media item. For example, if the media item is an image file captured by a mobile terminal (e.g., a photograph taken by a camera equipped mobile telephone) the calendar application will typically associate the image file with the date and time at which the image file was created or an event associated with the image file (e.g., a birthday party, a meeting, a family event, etc). Thus, the calendar-type applications allow the user to store media files, such as email, short message service (SMS) messages, voicemail, image files, video files and the like in a diary format to allow the user ready and efficient access to the media items.
Recent innovations have also made it possible for the mobile terminal to provide context-awareness functionality, such as location of the device, environment of the device's location, movement of the device, and the like. Such functionality is provided by including corresponding sensors in the device or enabling the terminal to communicate with external resources that provide context information. For example, the mobile terminal may be equipped with a Global Positioning Sensor (GPS) that provides the present location of the mobile device, a temperature sensor, an altitude sensor, motion or acceleration sensors and the like. External resources may be any external device capable of providing contextual information, such as access points, network nodes, other mobile communication devices, and the like.
Context-awareness is a key area of potential for mobile devices because it enables differentiation from stationary devices, like desktop computers, since mobile use is characterized by constant change in context (i.e., the device moves constantly and encounters constantly changing environments). Moreover, context-awareness enables an overall richer user-experience, and it provides the user with valuable information related to the context of the device.
In a typical context-awareness application the mobile terminal will be capable of providing current contextual information to the user. For example, an application may be implemented whereby the device is capable of providing the user, through a user interface, such as a display, with the current location of the device, the temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, or the like of the device's current location. Contextual information may also be captured, continuously or at a given time interval, and provided to certain types of applications that utilize the contextual information that is accumulated over time.
While numerous applications exist that enable a mobile terminal to store and/or access the increasingly voluminous amounts of media files and to provide current contextual information to the user, in order to access the stored data the user generally must go through several applications individually, scrolling through all of the data accessible by each application in order to find what they are looking for. For instance, the user may access his or her appointments via a calendar-type application, while accessing his or her email addresses or phone numbers via a contact/address book-type application. These applications do not provide the user with quick access to only the more relevant media files or contextual information in a single application or view. They do not allow the user to easily view the key pieces of information relating to the user all at one time.
A need, therefore, exists for a means by which a user can quickly and easily view information that is more relevant to the user at one point in time for various reasons.